A pulpy adventure story set in colonial Venezuela.
A debut novel tells the story of an indigenous man seeking his Spanish father in 17th-century South America.
Jabuti is a young, single man of the Piaroa, living in a village near the Orinoco River in Venezuela in 1697. Despite a reasonably good life, Jabuti can’t help but feel unsatisfied: “He had good friends, a peaceful village to live in and food in his belly, but he could not shake off the gnawing feeling of loneliness and despair, which haunted his every waking moment....But why can’t I break the spell?” He decides to consult the village shaman, who reveals to the man the secret of his origins: Jabuti is not an orphan, as he has grown up believing. Instead, his father is still alive. What’s more, he is one of the feared white men from across the sea who established a settlement in the lands of the Piaroa. With his best friends, Wanadi and Mapi, Jabuti sets out to find his father, even though it means leaving the safety of his village and journeying through a jungle full of dangers. The three quickly locate white men, but they prove to be trickier than any of them could have guessed. In his quest to discover his father—and himself—Jabuti’s trek through the jungle turns out to be just the beginning of a much longer odyssey. Shedlake (A Courageous Heart, 2017, etc.) writes in an expressive prose that keeps the tension high. The book is full of the sort of first contact moments that readers expect from a novel set in this New World milieu: “He had a dirty and straggly beard, interrupted by an angry looking scar….He held what looked like a weapon to Jabuti with a wooden grip and a fanciful long snout attached to it. Jabuti couldn’t take his eyes off the beautifully sculpted object as it glistened in the sun’s rays.” The slim work is only the first episode in a longer series (two more installments have since been published). As such, it doesn’t really stand on its own. But for those interested in the early colonial period in South America, this straightforward historical escapade provides all the requisite drama.
A pulpy adventure story set in colonial Venezuela.Pub Date: May 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-9926489-2-3
Page Count: 198
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A kind of Holden Caulfield who speaks bravely and winningly from inside the sorrows of autism: wonderful, simple, easy,...
Britisher Haddon debuts in the adult novel with the bittersweet tale of a 15-year-old autistic who’s also a math genius.
Christopher Boone has had some bad knocks: his mother has died (well, she went to the hospital and never came back), and soon after he found a neighbor’s dog on the front lawn, slain by a garden fork stuck through it. A teacher said that he should write something that he “would like to read himself”—and so he embarks on this book, a murder mystery that will reveal who killed Mrs. Shears’s dog. First off, though, is a night in jail for hitting the policeman who questions him about the dog (the cop made the mistake of grabbing the boy by the arm when he can’t stand to be touched—any more than he can stand the colors yellow or brown, or not knowing what’s going to happen next). Christopher’s father bails him out but forbids his doing any more “detecting” about the dog-murder. When Christopher disobeys (and writes about it in his book), a fight ensues and his father confiscates the book. In time, detective-Christopher finds it, along with certain other clues that reveal a very great deal indeed about his mother’s “death,” his father’s own part in it—and the murder of the dog. Calming himself by doing roots, cubes, prime numbers, and math problems in his head, Christopher runs away, braves a train-ride to London, and finds—his mother. How can this be? Read and see. Neither parent, if truth be told, is the least bit prepossessing or more than a cutout. Christopher, though, with pet rat Toby in his pocket and advanced “maths” in his head, is another matter indeed, and readers will cheer when, way precociously, he takes his A-level maths and does brilliantly.
A kind of Holden Caulfield who speaks bravely and winningly from inside the sorrows of autism: wonderful, simple, easy, moving, and likely to be a smash.Pub Date: June 17, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-50945-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
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